Huawei Aims At India, Starting Making Phones Here In 2019

The second largest phone manufacturer in the world, Huawei, will start making mobile phones in India from 2019 as the $150 billion Chinese firm has plan to open 1,000 company-branded stores around India for gaining its own position in this market.

Jim Xu, who is Global VP for Huawei’s consumer business group, accounting for $52 billion sales last year, stated that although India is a competitive and tough market, it is still among the world’s most lucrative destination for electronics device and smartphone producers.

As Xu said to TOI, they had a strategic look at India and now they intended to increase their appearance by launching devices in the middle- and premium-end market.

Huawei is the biggest device manufacturer in China, which is the largest market for smartphone in the world, the giant made up 153 million of 2017 global sales. Besides China, they see strong growth across various markets which include Europe where they have approximately 20% stake in total smartphone sales.

The firm is now present in Indiavia its sub-brand, Honor that is sold through online channels.

Xu added that right now, a limited number of handsets is imported here, and Huawei intends to raise the volume by manufacturing locally, espescially when considering the near-20% tax imposed on imported items.

He claimed that they definitely plan to conduct local manufacturing, and they intend to conduct this plan in partnership with Flex, the company’s manufacturing partner with a factory in Chennai.

Some of Huawei’s compatriots namely Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus and Vivo are selling in India already, their products are also competitive in terms of price. The current largest smartphone manufacturer in India which is ahead of Samsung, Xiaomi, purchases devices from the factories in India of Foxconn – a Taiwanese contract manufacturer.

Xu indicated that not only local presence, Huawei also has plan to conduct a retail and marketing blitzkrieg in India. They may speand about $100 million in the first phase as part of their outreach investment. Besides, in the next two or three years, there may be 1,000 stores including company-operated and partner-owned.

One of the key component of the company’s strategy to expand its business is offline stores. Xu told that smart-watches and personal computers are the next categories that Hauwei will look at. They may start with importing these devices, but when they gain the scale, they will surely plan to localize manufacturing.

This will be the second time Huawei have made its way to India since the last time it tried and did not make much success.